While various literary analyses suggest different numbers, the most commonly cited framework is Christopher Booker's "The Seven Basic Plots": 1. Overcoming the Monster (e.g. Dracula; Star Wars) 2. Rags to Riches (Cinderella; Jane Eyre) 3. The Quest (LotR; Harry Potter) 4. Voyage and Return (Alice in Wonderland; The Wizard of Oz) 5. Comedy (A Midsummer Night's Dream) 6. Tragedy (Macbeth; Breaking Bad) 7. Rebirth (A Christmas Carol; Beauty and the Beast) Other major theories propose 36 dr... (...more)

Costco run * * * When I decided to leave "inSync", my Castle Age guild of almost 11 years, I looked at the 100v100 leaderboard and started at the top guild. #1, "Redemption" declined me, so I contacted officer "Frillyknickers" (Marty Zive) of second-place Elite Owls. We might have been FB friends years ago when games like CA tied deeper into FB's mechanics to promote friending. If so, that was before FB policy evolved away from such artifice and I purged a lot of rote game contacts. So, I had no ... (...more)

lunch variations: a big chickpea / carrot / romaine salad * * * A while back I stumbled across a gaming community website about adapting a "monster parts" salvaging system into D+D. This is a trope we see a lot in MMO games like Warcraft, FFXI and their ilk, which meshes with their crafting subsystems. My initial reaction was "squee" but having let that concept simmer on the backburner of my brain a while now, I think it's actually kind of a dead end. In MMOs, the goal is "keep players subsc... (...more)

brekarito 30g cocoa/soy bev 29g litter genie Discord has folded to UK mandatory social-media self-doxxing regulation. So, soon Discord users will have to upload some form of ID or perhaps work with a third-party mass-doxxing service to keep using their accounts. Castle Age settled on Discord as a platform for community engagement around 2017. For my stint playing Realm of the Mad God, I also lurked on that Discord, and though I hardly followed them at all beyond initial landing, Mensa's TTRP... (...more)

cocoa soy and supplement powder pods pipelined thru Sat 8 pepper jack / turkey kielbasa brekaritos added to Mrs batch load / run shwasher * * * I should have internalized this lesson long before yesterday: browning and omeletting one burrito's worth of ingredients at a time is by far the most time-consuming way to make batches of brekaritos. BUT browning and scrambling 8 ritos' ingredients in one go, tends to give inconsistent filling ratios. The middle way is dice+brown all the meat at... (...more)